#icanhazpdf

[zinjanthropusboisei]

This is a small thing but I’m great at finding access to research articles and pdfs of books, and more importantly have extensive institutional access via my university library, so if you are hitting a paywall on something you really need, especially when shut out of on-campus resources because of COVID, I’m happy to help if I can. Especially if you’re looking for geo textbooks (You want Turcotte & Schubert? Stein & Wysession? I got ‘em).

[longestpathsearch]

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

An exclusive look at data from the controversial web site Sci-Hub reveals that the whole world, both poor and rich, is reading pirated research papers.

"The geography of Sci-Hub usage generally looks like a map of scientific productivity, but with some of the richer and poorer science-focused nations flipped.

Someone in Nuuk, Greenland, is reading a paper about how best to provide cancer treatment to indigenous populations. Research goes on in Libya, even as a civil war rages there. Someone in Benghazi is investigating a method for transmitting data between computers across an air gap. Far to the south in the oil-rich desert, someone near the town of Sabha is delving into fluid dynamics."

[anatomyofscience]

Pirate Science

In the last five years the internet has produced a variety of challengers to the traditional model of scientific publishing. Open publishing sites such as F1000 have created spaces where any research can be instantaneously released. Academics have been quietly subverting journal copyright on twitter for several years; using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to request a paper from peers and then deleting the tweet after the paper is emailed to them.

But now a more flagrant assault on the publishing industry has been mounted from Russia. In the last few weeks the website Sci-Hub has gone viral across the internet;tagged as “the Pirate Bay of science”. This repository of 48 million academic papers was founded by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, in response to her frustration at the difficulties of accessing papers. The website uses software that automatically accesses and downloads papers from a variety of sources to update its repository.Its location makes it unlikely that the website will be taken down any time soon. Elsevier, the world's largest academic publisher,successfully brought suit against the site last year, gaining an injunction from a New York court and forcing the site to change its domain. However, enforcing this judgement in Moscow seems unlikely.

The growing popularity of the site reflects discontent amongst universities and academics. Grumblings at various institutions over rising subscription fees have contributed to a sense of apathy amongst leading academics. In 2012 a group of mathematicians started a campaign encouraging researchers to boycott Elsevier journals. They produced a petition that was ultimately signed by 12,000 academics.  The action was seemingly successful in preventing an Elsevier backed piece of legislation called the Research Works Act being pursued in the US congress. However the campaign has led to little meaningful change since.

Elsevier’s profits for 2014 were approximately £680 million, not typical of the quaint curators of knowledge that one might imagine. Does this level of profit match the service they provide? The internet has a history of quashing companies that make distributing their product unnecessarily fiddly and rewarding services that are easy to use and non restrictive, Netflix for example. Even on university campuses attempting to access a paper that your university should have access to can be difficult. This process use is even more cumbersome off campus.

In contrast Sci-Hub is quick, with a simple clean interface and no log in process. An experimental search for a paper, on limbic stem cells from the early 1980’s ,yielded an immediate link to a pdf. Not only was this paper free, it was actually easier to obtain than by legitimate means. Traditional publishing will need to keep pace in terms of ease of use to continue to compete.

Is a revolution in the scientific publishing model on the horizon? Certainly it seems that the value that publishers provide to the academic process in the internet age is rapidly diminishing. The most important parts of the process, the research and peer review, are provided to the publishers free of charge.Would a model that combined open publishing of all papers with a more rigorous post publication review process be capable of ending traditional publishing? Being more willing to publish negative results would arguably improve the scientific process,while major paper retractions, STAP cells for example,have demonstrated that the peer review system is not infallible.

In my opinion, although the profits generated by the publishing industry are vastly outsized for their role, essentially as academic middle men, they still have some fight left in them. Their greatest strength is the prestige of the journals they curate.What scientists want is simple;to do innovative research and share it with their peers in the best journals. While high impact journals such as Nature or the Lancet continue to set the the direction of research and dominate academic discourse the big publishers will continue to wield great influence and will find a way of turning a profit. The revolution will have to wait for a while.

Jonathan Kossoff

[thepinakes]

#ICanHazPDF vs. #ICanHazLibrary: Where Librarians Need to Rise to the Occasion | ALCTS Collection = Connection

Does the popularity of the #ICanHazPDF hashtag signal the failure of interlibrary loan?

[displacedca]

I learned something new today

It started with this: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/11/how-to/access-free-academia

Someone responded with a plea for libraries (to which a librarian responded in the comments): http://labandfield.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/how-icanhazpdf-can-hurt-our-academic-libraries

And the scientists got involved: http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/twitter-for-scientists-a-few-tips-bioinfocus/

And a few people started saying they were taking on the man: http://neuroconscience.com/2013/01/16/join-papester-collective-1-0-how-to-reply-to-icanhazpdf-in-3-seconds/ and http://cenblog.org/terra-sigillata/2011/12/22/icanhazpdf-civil-disobedience/

Basically, a twitter hashtag that amounts to (possibly illegal) open access ILL. The internet is SO COOL.

[scientificsidelights]

1034. ENVIRONMENT CANNOT ORIGINATE ADAPTATION: Tubular Flower Cannot Produce Humming-bird's Bill.

But correlation in this sense [i. e., between different parts of the same organism] helps but a little way indeed in conceiving the origin of a new species. There might be the most minute and perfect harmony between the changes effected in an animal newly born without those changes tending even in the most remote degree towards the establishment of a new form of life. In order to that establishment there must be another correlation, and a correlation of a higher kind. There must be a correlation between those changes and all the outward conditions amidst which the new form is to be placed and live. If this correlation fails the new form will die. Yet, so far as we can see, this kind of correlation is without any physical cause. It is not necessarily involved, as the other kind of correlation is, in the very idea of growth. On the contrary, it is not only entirely separable in thought, but, as we see in monstrosities, it is sometimes sepa- rated in fact. We have no conception of any force emanating from external things which shall mold the structure of an organ- ism in harmony with themselves. Mr. Darwin freely confesses this, and says that many considerations "incline him to lay very little weight on the direct action of the conditions of life" in producing variety of form. We can conceive, dimly indeed, but still we can conceive, how in the humming-birds a special form of wing shall be correlated with a special form of bill. But we have no conception whatever how a special form of bill should be correlated with a special form of flower from which the bill is to extract its food. Mr. Darwin has shown how an improved bill, when once produced, will be preserved by finding external conditions to which it is adapted. But he has not shown, and he frankly confesses he has no idea, how the adapted variation of bill comes to be born at all.

— ARGYLL Reign of Law, ch. 5, p. 149. (Burt.) 

Blogger's note: Actually, we do have some idea what biological phenomena lead to beak shape variations. In 2004, Arkhat Abzhanov and some other scientists looked into how concentrations of certain proteins during embryonic development affected finches' beak shape at maturity. There's a decent writeup from 2007 in the New York Times of that and other relatively early Evo-Devo landmarks, or you can find the paper here.